Louis Janssens & Toneelhuis // Amour

Amour is a performance about how love gives direction to and determines our lives. How do we try to love the other and ourselves? Seven queer actors throw their voice and their body into the battle to tell a universal and loving story. A performance like a heartbeat, a breath, a churning sea. Inspiration comes from the life and work of the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. His dark, lonely, and often theatrical visual language creates an imaginative world in which Amour also moves. Louis Janssens writes a new text in which confessions, declarations of love, thoughts, rejections, and desires alternate. Short fragments follow each other rhythmically and complement each other. In this way, a score arises in which love presents itself in all its facets: a cinematic mosaic that takes you along various conversations, encounters, look-backs, and confrontations. The players seem to become one body together, speak as one voice, in one breath, in one movement. Personal experiences are combined with fictional stories. The masculine, the feminine, and everything in between constantly alternate. The players become everyone's man and everyone's woman. They play the life and the suffering of us all. About the makers In recent years, Louis Janssens successfully made a number of intimate, personal, and minimalist performances. He created the solo performance Serenade (selected for #nieuwjong of Het TheaterFestival 2021), the duet Analoog with Willem de Wolf/De HOE (selected for Het TheaterFestival and Nederlands Theaterfestival 2023), Desire (selected for Het TheaterFestival 2024), and last season Family. A number of these performances were shown in De Werf Cultuurhuis. Met Amour he now makes a larger performance for the first time together with Peter Seynaeve (NTGent, Het Zuidelijk Toneel), Marjan De Schutter (Toneelhuis, Artemis), Mourad Baaiz (Artemis/Het Zuidelijk Toneel, Ontroerend Goed), Leonore Spee (Ontroerend Goed, Teletext), Sophia Bauer (Kopergietery, Tibaldus), and Rein De Koninck (internship Conservatorium Antwerpen).